Flee the moose.

Trouble at the Yoyodyne plant

Our own local nuke disaster! Two cheers for Rocketdyne.

An odd thing about Rocketdyne. There was an incident at that same Simi plant in the 1980s where they had some bad rocket fuel chemicals they had to get rid of. To avoid the complicated and expensive right way of doing things, they sent a couple of guys out on the range to burn the toxic rocket goop. Instead it blew up and killed both of them. One of them shared my (very rare) last name and is therefore almost certain to be my relative.

Another odd thing about this story: The Rocketdyne plant and the nuclear accident were both up in Santa Susana, which is where Charlie Manson lived. Hmm.

Study Says Lab Meltdown Caused Cancer
Scientists say details about the 1959 accident near Simi Valley continue to be withheld. Other contamination at the site is much clearer.
By Amanda Covarrubias
Times Staff Writer

October 6, 2006

Radioactive emissions from a 1959 nuclear accident at a research lab near Simi Valley appear to have been much greater than previously suspected and could have resulted in hundreds of cancers in surrounding communities, according to a study released Thursday.

Continue reading “Trouble at the Yoyodyne plant” →

HEADLINE OF THE DAY

Courtesy yoscott. Also: these people need to hire a specialized employee called a “newswriter.”

FLYING HOG HITS VAN
By Rosa Duarte
WSLS NewsChannel 10
Thursday, October 5, 2006

A family van catches on fire after hitting a flying hog.

Only charred remains is all that’s left of the van. Lisa Hancock says she was driving back home from church Tuesday night with her husband and son, when a 500 pound hog crossed the road in front of them on Route 21 in Wythe County.

Another car, driving in the opposite direction hit the hog first, sending the animal flying on top of the hood of the mini van.

Lisa says the flames began to spark out of the hood after the impact, that when she and her family got out. The driver of the other car wasn’t hurt, both cars were totaled.

The person responsible for the damage is the farmer who owns the hog, the farm is down the road from where the accident happened.

Music ALERT: Greg Franco’s Wandering Bear

My good friend Greg Franco has put out a record he made in 2004 with David Kilgour and Bob Scott of New Zealand’s legendary The Clean: Southpawwest by Greg Franco’s Wandering Bear.

Go buy it here now: http://www.powertoolrecords.co.nz/gregfranco.htm

Another sign of the oncoming Apocalypse/Singularity/Eschaton

I just got email from Bob Trout.

It will come, it will come, it will surely come

My love of weird underground “popular” music began in my teens. I subscribed to LMNOP and got the New Music Distribution Service catalog to find more of it. I listened to KPFK’s “12 O’Clock Rock” with Andrea ‘Enthal, Chris Morris, Beau Clifford and company. And at the time the local teen radio station, KROQ, was inventing the Rock of the 80s format and hadn’t quite got it down yet, so they played a lot of weird stuff too.

Sometimes it was hard to find out what anyone had played, though. There wasn’t any Internet for looking stuff up. The stations were terrible at saying what they’d played, too. If I was at home I could call the station and ask, but there weren’t any cellphones either, so if I heard it on a portable or in a car I was SOL. What was that SONG? It was so GOOD!

When I was in high school, my mother and I went to see Diva in Santa Monica. I liked the movie and the soundtrack. But in the theatre before the movie I heard a song, too. It was catchy and fun, and the bits of lyrics I could catch were funny. And it had that New Weird Sound I liked so much. I couldn’t catch the refrain properly, though. On that sound system it was hard to pick things out, and the lyrics were obviously obscure and hard to intuit. What was that SONG? It was so GOOD!

I spent more than a year tracking the thing down. I only heard it twice more on the radio. The first was on KROQ when I was in a car. I totally had a full-on cow due to my inability to find out the name of the song, and of course the DJ only backannounced two songs and not the whole set. Asshole! What was that SONG? It was so GOOD!

The second time was on KPFK and I was at home, months later. I ran out of my bedroom in the middle of the night and called. Andrea was surprised that anyone didn’t already have the record, of course. The song was “King’s Lead Hat” from Brian Eno’s album Before And After Science. It remains one of my favorite songs and favorite albums. Here it is: King’s Lead Hat (.mp3, 3.7M).

The lyrics are mysterious and loads of fun. There’s a tiny bit of a story line and a lot of nonsense.

Twenty-five years later I finally hear that the song title is an anagram of “Talking Heads.” I wonder what other mysteries lurk? That song is so GOOD!

I love the Atlantis/Remington/Boylston job ads

Always multiple exclamation points, always superlatives or out-of-control adjectives. You can practically taste the c-c-c… coffee:

Retail powerhouse seeks a dynamic WINDOWS ENGINEER!!

Mature Start-up Needs Energetic Linux Engineer–Linux, Shell, Apache!!

Very Successful Network Services Company Needs Sr. Network Engineer!!

Catalina vision

I grew up in a hazy place.

“The Bay of Smokes” was smoggy before anyone brought a car here. The inversion layer in the atmosphere holds everything in, and the higher humidity near the coast adds a Vaseline glaze to the air. Most days the mountains are barely visible.

Twenty-six miles off the coast is Catalina Island. It’s a small tourist destination for a day outing, and pleasure boats sail to its coves and isthmus. There isn’t much on the island.

On a typically hazy Newport Beach day, the question is always: can you see Catalina? On the beach, or up on Cliff Drive, or at the top of the big escalator at the Fashion Island mall, there’s a clear view of the Pacific. Does it just fade into blue-gray out there, or can you pick out the island?

As a kid I always wanted to see Catalina even when no one else could. I’d mistakenly pick out the Palos Verdes Peninsula north of us and my father would gently correct me, or I’d just pretend I could see it. I always wanted to see the island and was delighted whenever it was clear enough that the whole length of it, including the isthmus and the smaller secondary island past it, could be clearly seen. On very rare days when it was completely clear, Catalina looked alarmingly close. I remember on one such day asking my father if the island was coming closer. I must have been very young.

We had a 28 foot sailboat, just big enough to hold the family, and we sailed to Catalina many times. It’s an all-day trip in a sailboat. We had access to moor at White’s Landing in Hen Rock Cove. There are bison and wild pigs on the island, and I was languidly pursued by a bison once when I was about 9, terrifying me. But in general I loved our visits to the island and the cove.

The picture at the top is shot from the beach at Laguna, and Catalina is just barely visible. There’s a gradient between two shades of blue-gray, and there’s the island. The detail below might be easier to see: